I didn’t end up leaving the house, so I was just in lounge wear all day sewing a (hopefully) wearable muslin of the Seamwork Perry from the latest issue.
I spent a lazy day trimming the pages for a few Seamwork patterns then taped the Perry together. Then I spent way too long trying to decide which size to make. Of course all this while I’m lazing on my couch watching the Magic Mike movies and then 10 Things I Hate About You for the 200th time. Hopefully I’ll post something about that Perry soon.
On to the bad work bathroom selfies for the week.
Monday, May 9
Colette Moneta. This is one of my favorite dresses to wear.
Today’s dress is my dyed GreenStyle Creations Laurel. I’m not sure I love this dress. Although, it has gotten fairly big — more so than a lot of my other dresses I made during the same time. So that might be one of the reasons I feel like it’s not the most flattering silhouette on me.
Thursday, May 12
Another Ottobre Twig made out of the white green daisy on white cotton jersey knit from a Girl Charlee knitfix that I dyed purple.
Friday, May 13
Lady Skater dress. I took a bunch of cute photos in this dress at the pocket park at the end of the street, but apparently never posted anything about it. Worst. Blogger. Evar.
Saturay, May 14
This is a Seamwork Perry that I finished up on Friday. I really like it and I already have my next one cut. I need to take some better photos then write up a blog post about it. My husband didn’t tell me that I was frowning in almost all of them.
My (almost 20 year old) daughter is named Anna, so the dress I made for Portland DOR was my 4th Anna, but the 3rd By Hand London Anna. I haven’t blogged about either of the other two yet. I made a floor length red and gold one last year for the Banff DOR’s Red & White ball. That was the first one I planned to make, but it ended up being my second one.
My first was an unplanned make that I ended up needing to wear to a funeral.
Both of them were sewn with French seams (the first time I’d ever done that!) and lined bodice. The black dress (lovingly referred to as my Melissa dress) also has a skirt lining that hangs freely.
I love the way they fit and, unfortunately I don’t have any good photos of either of them on me. But I do have this one with my dance instructor, Ya-Ya, and some real life Mounties.
At some point in the past I purchased some of this interesting looking velour from Morex Fabrics with the intention of making a muslin of the Seamwork Camden that was inexpensive but still pretty enough to wear if it worked out.
When it arrived, I discovered that velour is stretchy, which I should have known, but didn’t occur to me for some reason. So I instead, for some reason, cut a bodice for an Anna, removing the back zipper seam. I sewed it up to see how it fit in a stretchy fabric and then I put it aside.
Fast forward a few months and I need at least one more dress for my long weekend of dancing, but I’m having trouble deciding on what to make. So I decided to cut a skater style skirt to attach to this waiting bodice. I took the Anna front skirt pieces and lay them out with the center front on the fold and the side front piece overlapping the center front piece by the 5/8″ seam allowance. I then placed the skirt piece from my Lady Skater pattern on top for comparison and spread the side front piece away from the center front piece, keeping them connected at the seam line. I did that until the side seams were parallel. The Lady Skater piece was more narrow, but I wanted the waist seam of the Anna skirt to stay the same. I then cut the fabric out around both pieces, lengthening the skirt a bit. (I’m sorry I didn’t think to take photos!). Then did the same for the back skirt.
I also lined the bodice with some white burnout knit fabric I had from a Girl Charlee bargain lot.
I decided to hem the dress with horsehair braid to give the skirt a little bit of extra body. It’s pretty subtle, but I really like how it turned out.
But I finished my newest Anna in time to take to Portland. I wore it the first night for the bus tour and dinner cruise. Then I took these photos in my hotel room afterward.
I got several compliments, which always makes me feel good. Most of the people from my dance studio know I make a lot of my own clothes, so I usually get some, “Did you make this one?” type questions.
This dress was really quite simple though and I really like how it looks. I think I’ll try making another in a fabric that suits itself for everyday wear.
This is my first year participating in Me-Made-May. Yay!
Here’s what I said in my pledge that I managed to add on the signup post on May 2nd.
I have planned to participate for a while, but now I’m officially stating that I, jennifer (MizzSmartyPants) of http://www.clothinghacker.com/, sign up as a participant of Me-Made-May ’16. I endeavor to wear at least one me-made item each work day for the duration of May 2016. In addition, I also pledge to wear a me-made item on any weekend day where I leave the house.
So here’s my first week of outfits.
Sunday, May 1 I was in Portland for a dance competition last weekend, but I knew that Sunday was May 1st, so I specifically packed a me-made dress to wear to come home in. Although, silly me, I didn’t think about getting a good photo, but I do have a photo that you can kind of see what I’m wearing.
I took this photo to see my hair after I took down the updo that the hair ladies gave me for Saturday’s competition that I slept in because I was too tired to deal with all the hairspray and glue (yes, glue) in my hair.
Monday, May 2 My work week photos will most likely all be work bathroom mirror shots. I don’t have a full length mirror at home for some reason and I’m always in too big of a rush out the door in the mornings anyway.
This is my animal print Moneta that I made over a year ago and wear quite often.
Tuesday, May 3
This is a dress from the Ottobre 5/2015 issue and the design is called Twig. I thought I blogged about it, but couldn’t find the published post. Well, it’s because I never finished the blog post and it’s sitting there as a draft. I guess I need to get on the ball with that!
Wednesday, May 4
This is my Rainbow Ethnic Chevron Lady Skater that I didn’t blog about, but mentioned in my Top 5 of 2015 post. It’s one of my favorite dresses because the colors are so pretty. I have some extra of this fabric so I can make another when this one wears out or if I lose too much weight to be able to wear it anymore.
Thursday, May 5
I was feeling a little blah this day and I also had a dance lesson after work and no clean dance pants to wear under a dress/skirt due to not having done laundry yet since spending a long weekend dancing. So I’m wearing RTW jeans with a See Kate Sew Dreamer Tee I made last summer from a green stripe knit and then hand painted flowers on it to cover up some dye bleed the fabric picked up in the wash. I swear I remember writing up a blog post about this top, but I don’t have one, so who knows what I was remembering. I’m also wearing my elephant kimono that I did actually blog about in February. I’m not as pleased with how I look in pants and tops because they all cut me right in half at my widest point. But I have some ideas about how to fix Friday, May 6
This is one of the dresses I made for last weekend’s dance competition. Friday night’s dinner had a Bohemian theme, so I, of course, had to make a dress. I was a little unsure about wearing it to work because it sorta feels a bit on the nicer side. But it was fine and I was worried about nothing. Saturday, May 7 This is a Simplicity 1375 dress I made last summer as part of a contest that I ended up winning. I thought I blogged about it because I remember writing details about the construction and posting a photo of the sketch I did if it. But I must just be blogging in my dreams.
I don’t think I’ve ever actually worn this dress before today. I wore a $3 Old Navy tank top underneath to give a little bit of modesty. I’m not usually one to worry about that too much, but the neckline on this dress is pretty low and we were going out to a family place for breakfast.
One of the themed nights of the Portland Dance O Rama was Bohemian. So, since that is a style that is very in right now, I thought it would be fun to make a dress that goes with the theme. I bought a lovely blue floral rayon woven fabric from JoAnn’s, but I also ordered a floral burnout knit from Fabric Mart. When the burnout knit arrived, I completely fell in love with the colors and I knew it would make the perfect long, flowy maxi.
But what pattern to use? I looked through my huge stash of patterns and had some candidates, but I also searched on The Fold Line and asked in some FB sewing groups to see if there were any better, preferably PDF, patterns that would work. But after all was said and done, I settled on Burda 6950 that I had in my stash of paper patterns.
I made the longer version as is without hemming it, then tried it on and measured how far away from the floor it fell. I then added seam and hem allowances to that measurement and cut two panels of that height and the width of the fabric. I sewed them together end to end, gathered it up, using the dental floss and zig zag stitch method and added a nice ruffle to the bottom.
At first I also added some eyelet lace trim and basted it together, but it looked a little too Little House on the Prairie for my taste. So I ripped it all out. I’m really sorry now that I didn’t get a photo of it before deciding to remove it. I’m sure you would all agree that I made the right choice though.
The other change I mad to the pattern was I lengthened the sleeves to be long enough to reach my wrist plus an allowance for a narrow casing. I just extended it straight, instead of tapering it and then added elastic at the wrist to produce a wide, romantic sleeve.
I wanted some buttons to match the magenta color in the fabric, but I couldn’t find any at the 3 different fabric stores I went to. While I was at Pacific Fabrics, the ladies working there didn’t seem to have a lot to do, so when they asked me what I was looking for, I actually enlisted their help. One of them suggested I use fabric covered buttons, which I hadn’t done before. She then further came up with the idea to use a matching ribbon to cover them instead of just using the dress fabric.
I really love how it came out, even though the color isn’t quite a perfect match. And the buttons exactly match the ribbon I used for the neckline and waistline ties. Although, I’m thinking I might remove those and add elastic there instead. The ties are cute, but it just feels awkward when putting the dress on.
The dress was a big hit at the event and I got several gushing comments on it. Even though I only wore it for about 90 mins during dinner before I had to change back into my dance dress for the evening competition, I was very glad that I made it.
I had hoped to make a slip dress to wear under it in a peach knit fabric I have in my stash, but I had a lot of sewing to do for my event and since I already had a dark brown RTW slip dress, I made the peach dress the lowest priority in the sewing todo list, so it ended up getting cut. Since I don’t really have any other plans for that fabric, I’ll probably go ahead and still do it to wear with this dress in the future. But the brown looks nice as the under layer, so I’m not complaining.
I love how this dress is so light and flowy. When a breeze kicks up or I’m walking fast, the skirt whips against my legs and just feels cool.
I’m sure I’ll be making some more of this dress, but next time I’ll probably do it as the pattern is drafted.
I’ve been sewing up a storm for the last couple of weeks. I’m headed down I-5 a bit to Portland, OR for the Arthur Murray Dance O Rama competition this weekend.
There are three evenings worth of outfits I had hoped to make, plus a rhythm dress for the actual competition. I’m one dress short, partially because the fabric I thought was arriving on Saturday didn’t show up until Monday, but mostly because I’ve been pretty sick the last couple of days and I just didn’t have the energy to whip out the last dress. But it’s alright, I have a few RTW options in my closet that will work.
I’ll go into more detail about each of these after I get some better photos. In the mean time, here are some sneak peeks.
Wish me luck at my competition, because I sure need it! And hopefully I’ll have some good action shots of my new rhythm dress to share.
I love a good challenge. I don’t always finish in time for “official” challenges. But guess what?! I squeaked in just under the deadline for this one.
Fabric Mart was running a contest to sew up a mystery bundle. It sounded fun, so I bought one of the 6 yard fashion bundles. Here’s what I got:
2 3/4 yards of a nice, thick black and white double knit, 1 1/2 yards of a strange gray-brown crinkly poly (I’m guessing, I didn’t do a burn test) fabric and 2 yards of a lovely blue chevron lace.
I immediately fell in love with the knit and knew I wanted to try making a Colette Wren out of it. I had already printed and taped the pattern together, so I was ready. The fabric was a dream to work with and it was 70 in wide, so I even have a nice sized chunk left over.
I made a size smaller than I normally would have because I’ve lost 18 lbs in the last 2 months and I’m planning on continuing to lose, so I wanted something I could wear come fall, since this fabric weight and color are suited more for cooler weather. I can’t really tell from that photo, but the dress is very tight right now, but it should be perfect come fall.
I also wanted pockets in my dress, but since I was making the slimmer skirt, I didn’t think my go to in-seam pocket would work well. So I cut the side front panel to put pockets in.
I don’t know what you call these kind of pockets, but I drafted them similar to the pockets in my Ottobre dresses.
They are plenty deep enough to fit my phone and that makes me happy. Although, I think they are a tad too high to put my hands into comfortably, so next time I’ll lower them an inch or two.
Next, I decided to make a Seamwork Osaka from the gray/brown fabric and pair it with a blue, white and brown plaid cotton lawn I had in my stash.
The Osaka is a reverse wrap skirt and you can use 4 different fabrics, but I just used the two and swapped the placement on the reverse.
I like the skirt alright, but, again, I made it a size smaller than I actually am. Also that fabric is strange and doesn’t press well, but it also doesn’t really look like it’s meant to be crinkly. I’ll likely wear it with the blue plaid on the bottom and a shirt untucked.
I love how this turned out. I used the selvage edge as the hem and I just turned the edge and used a straight stitch along the front/neckline and the sleeve hem.
So, there you have it. My random fabric makes.
So, what do you think, do you enjoy the challenge of making something out of a fabric you did not choose?
I’m not sure why I haven’t posted about this dress sooner. I cut it out MONTHS ago and it sat there in its gallon Ziploc on my sewing table until February when I sewed it up for The Monthly Stitch‘s UFO challenge. But I didn’t get the photos done in a timely manner and I missed February by a week and didn’t want my first post there to already be late.
So now here I am finally posting about this dress.
The fabric definitely screamed “70s!” at me. So I thought this pattern would be good, especially with the bell sleeves. I actually ended up chopping several inches off the length because when I tried it on before I hemmed it, I thought it would look the part better as a mini.
It came together pretty fast. I’m not sure why I took so long to sew it up. Probably because it called for bias tape for the sleeve gathers and that sounded like work. But it was super simple.
I have yet to wear this dress in public. I imagine I eventually will. I’ll probably pack it with me on our trip to Disneyland this next week with some shorts to wear under it, of course.
Several months ago, I started making view C of McCall’s 6801 from a cotton lycra fabric that I got in my knitfix bag in July. I got to a step that needed to add seam binding to the side seams and didn’t have any, so it got added to the UFO pile for a while. The February Monthly Stitch UFO challenge made me fish it out and finish it.
I made the size according to my measurements and sewed it up exactly according to the instructions. But the dress ended up being way too big. So I took it in quite a bit on the side seams and I ended up just cutting off the seam binding anyway. I think the gathers on the side would be held in place much better using the seam binding, but I don’t mind the way it is now.
The back neckline gapes some. But it could just be stretched out from trying it on so much. I steamed it a bit and it seemed to shrink up, but I took it off and put it back on a couple of times since then, so it may have stretched back out again. It’s hard to tell.
The lining was cut from a firm nylon Spandex blend fabric and I took it in slightly more until it was smaller than the outer dress and could help smooth things out so the dress could skim over my lovely lady lumps. I think it worked out pretty well.
I am quite pleased with this dress and my husband likes it too. I plan to try it again in a smaller size in the future before making any pattern alterations.
I’m not sure why I didn’t write this post sooner. Well, better late than never, right? Warning, it’s fairly wordy, so beware!
The dress (I nicknamed it “Modern Nature” after the song I used for the solo I made it for) as it is shown in part 3 of this series is the version I wore to the Seattle Dance-O-Rama (DOR) in 2014.
After DOR, my dress more or less sat for several months untouched. Then, in early 2015, I had a Quickstep routine that I planned on performing, so I decided to do some improvements to my dress.
I never really liked the yellow fabric I used for the skirt godets. It was thin and had glitter on it and it stuck to itself as well as the green ITY fabric of the body and was just generally very annoying. But it had been a last minute choice from JoAnn’s where there weren’t a lot of options that I liked and I didn’t have the time to look around. So, I literally cut them out.
Since then I had been ordering some various fabrics from Fabric Mart and Fashion Fabrics Club that I thought might be nice for a future ballroom gown. So I had some “Cobalt/Lime Animal Stripe Chiffon” in my stash that I thought looked nice with the green fabric of the main dress. The chiffon was too chiffony to work well by itself. I happened to have some green crepe back satin from JoAnn’s in my stash as well.
When I layered that under the chiffon, it was so pretty; the shine of the satin really came through and gave the chiffon some dimension (and stability) that it didn’t have alone. I used a regular glue stick to baste the chiffon to the satin to keep it from shifting around while I cut it. I cut new godets a bit bigger this time around and attached them in the seams that previously had the yellow ones.
I then glued more rhinestones until I had a sort of blobby belt going around my waist. I’m not super happy with how they show up from a distance, but live and learn, right?
I wore my dress in progress to a couple low key events (the basting, cutting and sewing was surprisingly time consuming and I always put things off to the last minute anyway.) But I had the godets fully attached for an in studio event as shown in this video:
It’s funny watching a video of yourself dancing wearing a dress you made yourself. There’s just SO MUCH to pick apart! These are the things I noticed right away:
The skirt flares out from pretty much my waist and it should be closer to my body down through my hips.
The panels in the center front and center back look too wide without godets in them.
The sleeve length is odd.
It doesn’t sparkle enough!
So, I went home and took each seam in quite a bit for several inches below the waist and cut the front and back panels in the center to add godets. That helped fix the first two problems.
Another problem that I already knew about from when I wore my dress at DOR was that after I danced several heats in a row, I would start to sweat and the sweat started to show through the dress, starting with under my arms, but only on the sleeve, not the bodice. The bodice of the dress has two layers of the green ITY and a swimsuit lining, so it’s three layers, but the sleeves were only a single layer of the green ITY, so there wasn’t anything to soak up the perspiration other than the outer fabric. This is something I definitely need to account for in my future dance dresses.
So, I removed the sleeves completely and cut the sleeve out of the swimsuit lining to the length I wanted them to be so that I would have lined sleeves. Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough of the green fabric to recut the sleeves. I experimented with the idea of trying to put a stripe of the chiffon + satin fabric across my forearm to make the seaming there look more intentional and to also tie that fabric in to the upper part of the dress, but I couldn’t figure out how to make a woven and knit work together the way I pictured it in my head. Instead I just sewed on the amount of green to make them into long sleeves ending with a point. I find that in my videos I don’t notice the seam across my forearm.
Some photos of me in the backyard.
Here are some in-action photos from the Banff DOR I participated in back in April 2015.
And here’s a video from the event.
Watching these videos, I still think I could take the side seams in a bit. But I think I’ve lost some weight since last year too, so I’ve been thinking I might more or less scrap this dress. If I did, I figured I could cut out the fabric around the rhinestones into interesting shapes and use those as appliques on a future dress. I do enjoy the style of dresses that have more dimension than this one does, so I’d like to incorporate that into the future.
I still have the pattern I drafted to make this dress, but at this point, I’ve made so many alterations here and there over the years that I didn’t notate, that I think it might be easier to just start the entire drafting process over again for my next dress.
Next on the agenda is to put together a rhythm dress, hopefully before I go to the Portland DOR at the end of April.
I have made many Kitschy Coo Lady Skaters and this is the latest. I cut this out several weeks ago and finally got around to sewing it up last Friday.
I love this pattern so much. To call it TNT would be a huge understatement. It’s my Go To dress, especially if I only have 2 yards of a fabric.
I had heard that making it in Ponte de Roma makes a very nice draping version and I’m quite pleased with how this one turned out. I have a couple more ponte fabrics that are destined to be new Lady Skaters.
After I made my first version, I shortened the bodice by an inch and made the shoulders a bit more narrow, but those are the only alterations I did to the pattern that I have used over and over. Oh, except adding pockets, of course. I use the pocket piece from my Colette Moneta to make in-seam pockets and place them 4 inches down from the top of the skirt piece.
This dress is a fast make and I can practically do it with my eyes closed by now. But I love how the fit and flare style looks on my body, so I’m always happy to have another to add to my wardrobe.
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